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Real-time system, in-game benefits

Once you have all the needed elements—components, recipe, and Tradeskill—it’s time to get crafting. Just select the recipe you want to make and you’re off. If you have all the needed components, construction begins immediately. The system takes care of itself, so all you do is click the item later to collect it. Crafting takes real time, though, depending on the size and complexity of the object. A simple food item might only take a few minutes, whereas a car takes several weeks to complete.

To make things easy, you can queue up a few items and let them assemble automatically while you run missions, fight bad guys, and so on. Recipes will complete themselves no matter what you’re doing, even if you log out of the game. But the only way to speed things along is to use a crafting workshop or gain special crafting abilities (apart from your Tradeskills). In fact, some very complex items require that characters stay in the workshop for the duration of the construction time.

Crafting has one more perk: Characters earn experience points (in addition to Tradeskill leveling) for any items crafted. The more complex the item, the more XP the character earns.

Now that you have all the information you need to survive the apocalypse, go craft! Society isn’t going to rebuild itself, you know.